We just finished some work for a large National Government data provider who measures their number of files in the millions, records in the tens to hundreds of millions, and storage in sub-petabyte. Below is the obfuscated general requirements if you were to be looking to deliver your bulk data in the cloud : Storage requirements, access, methods, discovery, communications, and applications.

These requirements have been generalized or completely redacted or some cases, added to, to allow for all in Government Open Data delivery with large public datasets to consider. This is simply the business requirements, and not considering the technologies, vendors, cost models, capacity planning, etc. That was done separately.

For faster and likely larger file requests, User requests a directory, set of directories, set of files or a mix to be put onto storage device by the service provider and the device is delivered back to user.

For faster and likely larger file requests, User requests a directory, set of directories, set of files or a mix to be put onto storage device by the service provider and the device is delivered back to user. Bulk Media minimum specifications for external hard drives

Users who have existing cloud accounts for storage or who have virtual machine processing points on the cloud, will make requests or will pull a directory, set of directories, set of files or a mix Data pushed to the users cloud point

Data Products are usually downloaded via keyword, geospatial or temporal product discovery applications based on filtering their search, creating an order, and downloading the products in small group.

Public file directory listing should be discoverable and optimized for discovery by search engines

Public collections should be discoverable and optimized for discovery by search engines

Explicitly demonstrate how bulk data registrations will be discoverable and registered in both Sciencebase.gov and data.gov

Catalogs should be able to pull or push harvest public FGDC, ISO-19115, or RDF metadata of files in the directories for transaction or bulk loading into their catalog.

File Directory Listing can be queried via open-standard discovery service to assist in developing a download filter list.

The National Map can be discoverable in proposed service provider catalog, but the catalog reference needs to follow the metadata provided along with each file with at minimum presenting source, created date, updated day, title, basic description, and the provided DOI link for the file or directory.

Service Provider should be able to be support being called via a Digital Object Identifier

Users can subscribe to changes to directory, sub-directory, or specific files

Users can be notified of such changes via push notifications via such ways as per change, daily changes, RSS updates, or other notification techniques.

Users can use the notifications as ways to request the bulk file updates

7. Download API – Supporting applications or including applications that help the user download in bulk

Have a download API that can be controlled by api.data.gov which can uniquely identify, provide HTTP access to via GET parameter in a URL query, support an hourly limit of number of requests per hour based on API Key settings. If api.data.gov rate limit is exceeded, an HTTP status code of 503 should be returned.

3rd party applications should be able to support HTTP, REST, FTP, or SCP calls.

The file download should be able to support multiple file requests, allow for parallel downloads, handle restarting partial download file requests, and governor anonymous volume requests

Peer-to-Peer solution support (i.e. such as BitTorrent) must comply with Federal Regulations.

Identify what, availability, and cost for User Training and Sanctioned or third-party consultants for Software Developers is available

8. Applications – Support the end user experience for unzip files and load into geospatial database

If the user will received multiple zipped files that will require the user to click each link to download, unzip each file, and then load each file using the provided metadata manually into a database, can this be automated

Vendor can create premium either accelerator, increased access or additional formats are part of the delivery if branded separately as a vendor branded product and as long as there is one version that is published clearly marked as Authoritative Government as published and controlled by such in its original published form.